Supercharge your social media strategy with these 5 tools

2
Sep 11, 2015 / by
Supercharge your social media strategy with these 5 tools

If you’re a business owner, effective use of social media can help you to build relationships with your fans, boost brand awareness, demonstrate knowledge and drive organic traffic to your site.


In other words, if you’re looking to grow your business, a comprehensive social media campaign is a must, as is having the correct tools in your arsenal.

With so many tools available, it can be difficult to know which ones will provide value to your business – unless you have an unlimited amount of time available to try them all (not likely). While we can’t cover every quality tool on the market, here are 5 which are guaranteed to make a positive impact for your social media campaign.

1 – Buzz Sumo

Conjuring up a topic which is likely to cultivate engagement is one of the most difficult parts of creating a piece of content. Fortunately, with Buzz Sumo you can receive unique insights about the most popular topics circulating the internet. You can even narrow this information down by niche in order to generate content which is precisely tailored to your target demographic.

While sometimes the best content ideas come straight out of the aether, it’s also good to follow hot trends and inject your brand’s story into current events. This is particularly useful if there is a stir in your industry and you’re looking for something share on social media which your followers are likely to appreciate and engage with.

2 – Fanpage Karma

Much has been written about how to market your brand on Facebook effectively. However, other than obvious metrics such as the amount of likes you regularly receive when you post content, it can be difficult to know just how effective your strategies are in producing useful engagement and growth, month after month, year after year.

Fanpage Karma provides you with extremely helpful analytics for factors such as growth, engagement, response time and more. If you’re looking to use Facebook to market your brand and are committed to the long haul, Fanpage Karma is an excellent tool for tracking your efforts.

3 – Buffer

14438827850_d3c6940bb7_bWhat article about social media tools would be complete without mentioning the world’s number 1 post scheduling application, Buffer? You can link your Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Pinterest profiles to Buffer, which then allows you to schedule your posts across all the platforms. Buffer also provides some excellent analytics which provide insights into what time of day you should be posting in order to cultivate the maximum amount of engagement.

If you have your social media posts lined up for weeks or even months in advance, this allows you to get on with more pressing duties while social media runs on autopilot – although the app doesn’t work miracles: you will still have to enter discussions and respond to enquiries yourself! Incidentally, Buffer is also an excellent example of how to grow a business via guest blogging and content marketing, but that’s a story for another day.

Donna Moritz, founder of Socially Sorted, says the following about Buffer:

“Now, I am not a fan of automating everything but I am a fan of tools that allow me to post content throughout the day without bombarding everyone with a bunch of tweets or posts at once – any tool that supplements my ability to engage live on Twitter or Facebook is a good thing in my book.”

4 – Canva

According to a study by the aforementioned Buffer, tweets with images receive 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites and 150% more retweets! In some cases, your content might contain some great visuals which are perfect for social media – if you’re sharing an infographic, posting a thumbnail of it to accompany the tweet is an excellent tactic. However, what if you are simply posting a text-based blog post? While you may wish to pick an image from a free photo-sharing site such as Morguefile or Pixabay, it’s much better to have a custom image which summarises the article to accompany the tweet when it goes live.

This is where Canva comes in. This tool allows you to create unique, professional standard images with an easy drag-and-drop interface that anyone with zero design skills can use. Aside from paying a designer, Canva is the best tool available if you need original high quality images. Canva can be used for many things, but it’s absolutely perfect for Twitter.

5 – Inkybee

One of the best ways to boost your site’s organic traffic is by networking with key influencers and having them promote your brand (perhaps via guest blogs or other co-ventures). However, these influencers are difficult to find, particularly if you’re looking for someone in a niche which you’re unfamiliar with.

Fortunately, outreach tool Inkybee enables you to locate influencers in specific niches and then build relationships with them. Inkybee even provides you with a progress report for each influencer, showing criteria for the relationship, such as whether you’ve befriended them on Facebook, commented on their blog, retweeted their content and so forth. While metrics can never reflect the actual bond between two human beings, taking the actions recommended by Inkybee are certainly a great way to make a positive impression on the key influencers that have the power to bring huge amounts of new fans to your business.

Tags: / / / / / /